This disgusting feeling of stepping through one of those magical portals, neither Adán nor Quincy could ever get used to it, although this time they were more 'pleased'. It was all the more strange that they stumbled out of the portal headfirst instead of falling from the sky somewhere.
"Watch it!" Adán complained to Quincy, because when he stumbled through the portal shortly after Adán, he collided with him and accidentally gave him a headbutt. "It wasn't on purpose, chill out!" Quincy retorted, audibly inhaling and exhaling before finally asking, "Do you happen to know where we are?"
"How should I know? Why don't you ask the oracle?"
"You mean the shadow that said to me 'You will find me... blah blah'?"
"Yes, exactly."
"I have no idea where she is. She was just here a minute ago."
"Then she probably didn't come with us."
"That's a shame. I would have liked to ask her HOW I can find her."
"Haven't you already found her, I mean you've seen her, right?"
"No, I think she means her real body. My Ques..."
The system appeared in front of Quincy.
[WARNING! Revealing a quest will be severely punished!]
"What were you going to say, Quincy?"
"Oh, nothing. While we're on the subject... Didn't you say in the cell that you 'could get us out of here'? What happened with that?"
"But we're already out, aren't we?"
At this point, the two of them ended the conversation and as they looked around more intensively, they realized one thing: they had absolutely no idea where they were, because it wasn't Goltan or the Goltan Desert or any place they had ever been before. It was...
"I should ask the system where we are," thought Adán, and he asked the system as politely as possible, "Hey! System! Where are we?"
"Goltan? That can't be. Goltan is a city in the desert, not a damn cave full of silver veins that magically glow!"
"The location is a cave in the catacombs of Goltan," the system responded.
After receiving this detailed information, Adán sighed and said to Quincy, "We are in a cave in the catacombs of Goltan."
"Goltan has catacombs?"
"Yeah, that's news to me too, but now..."
Suddenly, there was a loud rumbling. The ground shook, and individual stalactites fell from the ceiling of the cave. Instead of forming rock or ice shards, each stalactite formed a small glowing puddle, from which little Hoasung (a mixture of a rabbit and a llama with wings on their backs) jumped out and fell face-first to the ground because their heads were too heavy. They then disappeared in a sparkling glow.
"Uh..." Quincy expressed his confusion, but Adán just shook his head as if to say 'ignore the event.'
But he couldn't. Quincy had a feeling that these Hoasung meant something, but he couldn't say exactly what - he couldn't even say roughly what it was.
Time passed. Meanwhile, the two explored the cave and defeated some creatures. They eventually came to a fork in the path. If they went left, there was a golden door, and if they went right, they saw daylight shining.
Of course, they only saw the door and not the daylight, so they went left and stood in front of the golden door.
With his arms crossed and a slight stabbing pain in his chest, Adán looked at the door, then audibly drew in his breath and said, "We have to go through there."
Quincy stared at Adán with a look that roughly meant 'seriously, that's obvious,' but instead of putting his feelings into words, he simply shrugged and said, "Yeah, seems so. But how do we get through that door?"
Obviously, both overlooked the oversized doorknob under which a wooden sign was attached with yarn that read "Turn left to open." They also overlooked the nailed board above the door on which "always open" was written. They stood rooted in front of the door, trying hard to figure out how to proceed.
Eventually, they got to the point of trying something out.
"Wait a minute," said Adán to Quincy , handing him an axe that Quincy could swear wasn't there before. Adán then adjusted his outfit, brushed off the dirt, took the axe back, and with a sweeping motion, swung it against the door.
An unpleasant metallic sound echoed.
"Well, that was a failure," Quincy jeered. Then, he tried for himself after taking the weapon from Adán. But nothing happened. Not even a metallic sound. Perhaps the swing was too weak.
"What's with all the noise?" a voice from the other side of the door complained. At the same moment, the person behind the voice opened the door from the other side, revealing a goblin who was clearly younger. "The door was open the whole time. Why don't you just come in?"
"We tested you. You passed the test! Bravo! Well done!" Quincy fibbed in a praising tone, applauding lightly.
The goblin waved him off, blushed, began to smile, and Quincy immediately vomited at the sight of the smile, causing the goblin's features to freeze for a moment. Then, he took his club out of the pouch he wore around his waist, unscrewed the top half of the club, took a mop attachment out of the other pouch he wore on his belly, screwed it onto the half-club, then he took the bucket in his left hand, placed it slightly forward, snapped his finger, a stalactite fell into the bucket, he killed the Hoasung that formed from it, and used the liquid remaining in the bucket to clean up the vomit – and stopped smiling.
"That was really unnecessary and somewhat insulting," the goblin complained about Quincy's behaviour and raised his finger in admonishment.
"Sorry..." Quincy stammered, embarrassed, and was promptly nudged in the ribs by Adán's elbow. Quincy gritted his teeth because it didn't hurt at all.
"Who are you anyway, goblin?" Adán asked, grumbling something unintelligible under his breath. (Not even me as the author is interested in what Adán grumbled about - probably nothing important.)
The goblin seemed delighted by the question, so he immediately packed up all his things, drew a circle in the air with his fingers, a kind of mini-portal opened, and he threw the full bucket and his bags through it.
"Ah, much better. Well, I'm a goblin, and they call me the Wayfinder. I show the way."
"Where to?" Adán asked sharply.
"Well, to the oracle!" the goblin answered his question, but Adán was only half pleased with the response. So he retorted that he said, "Wendeline can go to hell!"
The goblin looked contemptuous and countered with the words, "So can I. No, I'll take you to Yasmin. The real oracle, as was foretold before..." He paused for a moment, then continued, "Well, you'll see."
Then he set off, and Quincy and Adán followed him through an artificially created passage with many pictures on the side, depicting the world's history in broad strokes - but Quincy and Adán didn't notice any of it.
At the end, they stood before a wall with an engraved symbol.
"Now wait a minute, I'll open the way for us," the goblin said and uttered a spell gibberish.
The symbol glowed like fire, and then the wall disappeared, revealing an old wooden door behind it.
The goblin and his two new acquaintances walked through.
Adam and Quincy couldn't believe their eyes. It was a magnificently decorated, round room in the shape of a dome, and in the middle of the monumental room stood a simple coffin made of potassium.
"What is this?" Quincy asked, but he knew it was a coffin because he was neither blind nor stupid - correction: He was not blind.
"Quincy, you should go ahead," the goblin advised Quincy, and Quincy wondered how he knew his name because he hadn't mentioned it to him.
But without hesitation, no, as if his legs were moving on their own, he went to the coffin and placed his hand on it.
[Quest completed!]
[Reward: Transfer of Adán (Bjarne) system skill to you.]
At the same time, Adam also saw his system window in front of him:
[It's time to say goodbye. Thank you.]
With that, the system disappeared for Adam forever, and so did all the power Adam had received through the system.
Only now did Adam actually realize how old he was and how unnaturally young he could move. Only now, when his bones hurt badly and he could hardly breathe.
"Is there...?" Quincy asked the goblin, who nodded in agreement.
"Your friend can tell you more about it. Because he's been pretending not to know anything this whole time!" the goblin spoke, sitting down on the ground.
"What does that mean?" Quincy asked the goblin, then turned to Adán. "You tricked me?"
Tears welled up in Adán's eyes. "Yes. I had no choice, but I feel it's coming to an end for me now that you have my power, so I want to tell you the rest of the story."
And so Adán and Quincy also sat down, and Adán continued his story from where he had left off before.